September 2010

September 15, 2010

Things happened as I suspected in DC. I hope we don't live to regret it. I would not be surprised to see Fenty back in four or even eight years. Dukakis had a similar experience in Massachusetts, getting knocked off in a Democratic primary in 1978 after his first term -- and for similar reasons. He came back and won in 1982 and again in 1986 and then -- well we all know about that.

It appears that the tea party set has deprived the Republicans of another likely senate pick up in Delaware. Pretty amazing stuff. You can attack a lot of things in American politics, but I think there is a broad pro-masturbation (mental and otherwise) caucus out there. I can see a bumper sticker involving prying things from cold dead hands and the like.

Still waiting to see if the New Hampshire tea party set did us a similar favor.

It's crunch time now for everyone. We have to get over our sense of frustration and disappointment and focus on winning the many seats that are winnable -- especially in the Senate. There is still the possibility of having a half decent night on the Senate side if the Dems can give people a strong, coherent message and we can turn out the vote.

Alas, time for me to run out to another meeting to discuss pension benefit cuts -- it's what I do these days. Not exactly what I originally signed up for, but I guess that it's the difficult stuff that gets you to earn your keep.

September 14, 2010

Update: Good news! (BTW, I don't remember reading Atrios's comments on this. But I probably did.)

George Bush's Government Welfare for the Wealthy is expiring at the end of this year. It's my understanding that this will happen unless Congress does something about it - that is to say, unless a congressional session that has been characterized by the highest level of obstruction and gridlock in history manages, in a campaign season, to call in/keep its members in DC to create a bill, pass it in both houses, reconcile it and get it to Obama's desk for a signature.

Therefore, we're in the unusual situation where doing the right thing means doing nothing. At long last the forces of good can take advantage of Congress's institutional bent toward inaction.

So why isn't that happening? Why are Obama and Pelosi - two incredibly powerful Democrats who have said repeatedly that they do not want to extend George Bush's redistribution of wealth scheme - not using everything at their disposal to push this debate off to the future?

I suppose there is the issue of the campaign season we're in, the idea that Democrats, especially the hundreds of House members seeking reelection, want an issue upon which they can campaign.

Ok, then, fine. What I don't understand is why they immediately started the debate in terms of 'extending the Bush tax cuts.' Those tax cuts were designed to expire this year. They should not be under debate. They were a specific government program whose time is up, and, Democrats should say, it's incomprehensible why the 'party of limited government' is so set on extending the life of a government program that they themselves designed to have a limited life.

Any discussion of those tax cuts should be dismissed. They're over, done, yesterday's news. What the Democrats have is a new tax cut plan, one that takes into account the massive changes we've seen in our economy over the last 10 years. We're not sure why the GOP thinks that a program designed 10 years ago would be effective today, but it does make us worry that they either haven't been paying attention or they don't understand the simple fact that our economy isn't like it was 10 year ago.

So what we Democrats want to do is pass a tax cut program that takes into account what's happened in the last decade, that is informed by the economic reality we're facing now. We're not trying to artificially extend a government program designed to end after 10 years, we're coming up with solutions to the challenges we face now.

And so on. Obviously the Blue Dogs wouldn't want to frame the debate this way, but Pelosi and Obama could. I'm continually amazed at how bad the Democrats are at messaging. I understand that a lot of why conservative terms frame the debate is because of how conservative many Democrats are and how thoroughly many of them are under the control of corporations. But Democrats who don't fit that - and I'm looking at you, Pelosi and Obama - still can't seem to break out of the framework set by the GOP.

Politics in the District of Columbia itself -- the real place in which some of us live our daily lives as opposed to the abstraction routinely castigated by national politicians (who nonetheless never want to leave) -- is not ordinarily all that compelling. Other than the soap opera adventures of Marion Barry (about whom more later), there is just not that much to District politics typically -- it is a seriously one party town, with Democrats representing roughly 90% of the citizenry here. Almost all elections are effectively decided in the Democratic primary. We have only a few meaningful citywide offices for which to vote, lacking as we do representation in either the Senate or the House (where we have a non-voting delegate).

Things were shaken up a bit here in 2006, when the city elected then 35-year old Adrian Fenty as its mayor. Fenty -- a youthful, athletic, tall, lean, biracial newcomer -- seemed in some respects to be a local version of Barak Obama. He was a tireless retail campaigner who pushed an ambitious agenda that struck a chord throughout the District, resulting in a landslide victory over a respected veteran politician, the District's then City Council Chair Linda Cropp. Fenty won a resounding victory throughout the City, sweeping both the poor, largely African American neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River and the very affluent, very white neighborhoods west of the Rock Creek Park, where yours truly lives. (My twenty-five years of living within the District has been a 50-50 blend of time in gentrifying, mixed neighborhoods followed by twelve plus years in what I sometimes refer to as "Upper Caucasia, the land of the lawyers.")

Fenty successfully sought control over the District's truly sub-par public schools, which had previously been the purview of an elected School Board, a high risk strategy aimed at putting his stamp on promised improvements. Once he succeeded in obtaining this power, he appointed a young Korean American woman, Michelle Rhee, to be DC's Chancellor of Schools, a position in which she was given enormous powers to reform the public schools.

Fenty also sought to continue the successful improvements in provision of city services fostered by his predecessor Anthony Williams, including a massive campaign of public expenditures on improving the physical plants of the schools, along with the construction of athletic fields, recreation centers, and libraries. He has succeeded to a remarkable degree with respect to the latter venture, with an incredible array of new or renovated buildings and facilities throughout the District. At the same time, the District's rate of violent crime has dropped to levels not seen during the mid-1960s, a stark contrast to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when we averaged better than a murder a day here and when the battles between rival drug gangs meant that you could hear the periodic sounds of gunfire in my marginal neighborhoods.

Since 1969 and the 7.62 round I caught in the hip I have lived with pain. Like the ringing in my ears, it is sometimes no problem at all, just something that's always there, but, other days, the bad days, I need a cane to walk, and every step hurts. It's kind of strange, you can put your finger on the big ass hole I have in my pelvis and feel the working of the hip joint.

Every couple months or so I go through a gastrointestinal flare up. Every sip of water, every bite of food, goes right through me in a matter of mere minutes. I've never met a doctor who has been able to identify the bug that causes this, if they could I'm sure they'd figure out a way to kill the shit out of it. As near as anyone can tell it came from a operation where eight of us creeped up on the back of an NVA encampment by going through about fifteen miles of fetid, black water swamp. There were bugs in that slimy crap that nobody has ever seen, or wants to. Our doing that made the operation a success and helped us to take down a full battalion of NVA regulars who were on their way south. The Commies didn't think that there was any way through that morass, and figured even if there was a way through there wasn't anyone in the world crazy enough to try it. The five of us who survived that trip are all sick from the same unidentified parasite. It's not disabling or anything, but, every few months I can expect to go through a couple of days where all I can do is shit and puke. When it can't be controlled by over the counter stuff I head into the ER and tell them to hang a bag so I don't dehydrate. Then, it passes, and I go about my life.

Nightmares used to be a regular part of my life too. Now, not so much. Time is the best healer of that kind of thing. I tried both self-medicating and going the prescription route. I don't recommend that to the young guys I talk to about PTSD. If I were to take a sleeping pill and have one of those shitty Dong Ap Bai or Quang Tri style dreams the medication means that I can't wake up, the shit makes you stay there. Which really. Sucks. Mostly now, it's just that every now and then I have a rough night. Big fucking deal right?

Right when I got out of the service I spent a couple of months in the VA system and that look was all I needed to promise myself that I would find a way to not ever have to depend on them. I don't. My union gave me a chance to buy into a pretty good medical insurance program, it's good enough that even if they decided to tax the benefits I'd probably hang in there with it. One of the big things I'm grateful for is that I'm one of the very fortunate few who can afford that kind of thing while waiting for our country and government to decide that health care is a human right, not a commodity to be sold in a vicious marketplace.

So, Alan Simpson has decided that veterans who rely on the government for the treatment and management of their symptoms (and you cannot participate in combat very long without getting shit on you that sticks forever) are not helping our country.

Yeah, Mr. Simpson served. Dude was a pilot. Dude flew close to places where folks might shoot at him. Big fucking deal. Up at 40,000 feet, war is a long way down. Light years and far removed from the grunts in the muck and mud who actually have to see the faces of the folks they kill, usually while those folks are doing their level best to kill them. We had a name for guys like that. REMFs we called them. Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers. I started a glorious bar fight in Saigon by telling a pilot dude "Pilots make movies. Grunts make history."

I guess the point of this is to tell Mr. Simpson, and any other REMF bastard out there who figures they can save a buck here and there by denying care to our veterans that the only real savings they could ever make is to fucking quit sending us to places like that. Quit putting us in situations where the rational thing to do seems to be slogging through miles of slimy, fetid swamp that will make us sick for the rest of our lives. Quit giving government contracts to the guys who make poisons like Agent Orange, and for Gawd's fucking sake, don't hose us down with that shit.

Well, it will be interesting to see if elections still have consequences when Republicans win them. I am in no way enthusiastic about having Republicans back in office; the current platform of extending the Bush tax cuts and . . . um . . . well . . . er . . . seems beyond childish to me. But I can't say I'll be sorry to see Democrats leave. It's healthy for parties who overinterpret their mandates to be badly chastened.

Dear McMegan: It's not about parties. It's about the COUNTRY.

If I could smack the Dems around, electorally speaking, without putting the country in even worse shape than it is to deal with the problems facing it, I'd do it in a heartbeat: I'm pretty disgusted with their ineffectiveness and spinelessness.

But the GOP has turned into a party that will cheerfully wreck the country if doing so advances its political aims and fortunes. If that isn't obvious to you by now, then you haven't been paying attention. And the collection of issues that they bring to the fore (besides the inevitable "let's cut taxes on rich people") are increasingly simultaneously crazy, irrelevant, and just plain dumb: repealing the Seventeenth Amendment and the like.

I realize that "both sides suck" is a very popular meme in the world of major-league punditry that you're trying to break into. But sometimes it's a misleading lens, even if both sides do suck, because they may suck in asymmetrical ways. This is such a time in our nation's history. The Dems are pretty pathetic when it comes to fighting to make this nation of ours work in a way that benefits the vast majority of its citizens, but the GOP would gut the country to funnel money and power to the rich and to big corporations. There is a majorly important difference between the suckiness of the barbarians at the gate, and that of the weak-kneed defenders of the gate. One is far worse for the country than the other. And it's well past time for people like you to admit it.

Chasten the Democrats in some way that doesn't have repercussions for this country, 'kay?

September 10, 2010

The Case for Impeachment: Why Barack Hussein Obama Should be Impeached
to Save America" by Steven Baldwin covers all of these issues and more
in making its arguments.

"This is the beginning of the end for
the United States unless the people exercise their precious remaining
liberties and stand and demand that their elected representatives
impeach this president before further mortal damage is inflicted upon
America," the report concludes.

Before you snicker at this being from Steven Baldwin and the Western Journalism Center - "Making drunks on a street corner look rational since 1991!" - be aware that there is no source too discredited, no evidence too thin, no statement too extreme or theory too outlandish for A) The contemporary GOP to embrace and act upon it and B) The US media to thoughtfully purse their lips and nod along, noting that one time someone compared Bush to Hitler.

So here's my prediction: Darrell Issa (R-CA) already has articles of impeachment drawn up. If the GOP takes the House I'll give them a week before they start having hearings on impeachment with a vote soon after. If they take both houses of Congress, they'll impeach and convict Obama and Biden, giving us President Boehner before the summer recess.

What would be the downside? What price would they pay? And what possible evidence is there to suggest that the current GOP is not so thoroughly extreme, not so completely out of their minds that they wouldn't go through with this?

David Rector has been my friend for over 25 years. He took me under his wing when I was a radio newbie. He taught me how to cut tape (yes, you used to have to physically cut it to edit it; no digital wizardry back then). Over the years, he let me borrow equipment, encouraged my fledgling efforts, debated politics with me at lunch.

And now he's dying in a dump in San Diego, lying in his own filth, neglected and abused in a so-called health care facility. And hardly anybody -- including colleagues with whom he worked for 30 years -- gives a shit.

18 months ago, David suffered an aortic dissection and stroke. It left him brain damaged and briefly in a coma. At first he received excellent care. His fiancee Roz -- who has been by his side constantly, from the moment of the attack in their home, through all the initial surgery and rehab -- kept me updated regularly. He was treated at UCSMDC (University of California San Diego Medical Center). Then he was moved to a Long-Term Acute Care Facility called Kindred, where he also -- initially -- received excellent care. His trach was eventually removed, and he started, slowly, to regain function.

September 09, 2010

I am trying not to obsess about the mid-terms -- every time I see claims that the Republicans are going to win in a wave I feel more than a little sick to my stomach. I do sense that Obama has started to hit his stride a bit and has decided it's time to fight. I fear it is more than a bit late, but hope springs eternal.

After being in the nineties here yesterday, it has now dropped into the high sixties and now feels a bit like fall. I'm actually going to put on a light jacket I think for the 10:00 walk with Stanley.

Has anyone burned any holy books lately? Volumes from the Twilight series don't count.

September 08, 2010

Yglesias linked to this piece the other day by Karl Smith, a professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina, entitled a "Pessimist's Manifesto." At first I read it approvingly, detailing as it did the ways in which the good professor, seemingly a bit of a libertarian, found difficulty in dealing with conservatives in terms of their generally unrealistic attitudes about all manner of things.

Smith, on the other hand, stakes out a blunt and fundamental realism, based first and foremost on the inarguable proposition that we, and all of our friends and loved ones are going to die, and hence, that to some extent, we exist to build metaphorical sand castles. I don't really object to that as a starting point for considering life -- it is clear-eyed in the extreme. But then it descends into a kind of joyless nihilism (I prefer joyful nihilism myself):

Bad things happen because badness is the natural state of the world. If something good ever happens count yourself lucky and be aware that this too shall pass.

This is psedo-profundity, false gravitas, the pose of someone who actually doesn't strike me as knowing much about either life or politics. I find this a tad hard to swallow -- especially coming from a young man who seems to have landed himself a job as an assistant professor of economics at the University of North Carolina. Clearly, a number of good things have happened to Mr. Smith in his life. I would appreciate his acknowledging that.

Even in my bitterest days, I find my ardor for life remains pretty strong. Indeed, as I rounded the corner at 50 I felt some considerable regret that the journey is more likely than not considerably more than half over. There is so much that makes our lives more than some continual parade of badness -- friendship, love, sex, music, humor, literature, nature, beauty -- a good bottle, a good book, a lovely beach, a little riotous laughter, a faithful dog -- the list goes on and on.

But Smith's comments are not simply a bit of bullshit pessimism from a guy who at least on a superficial level strikes me as pretty damned fortunate. They are an attempt to justify political and economic passivity. Smith posits that:

Thus, I see our proper mission as easing pain, where we can, to the extent we can, the best we can. This is best done up close and personal where you are mostly likely to quickly notice if your efforts to help are actually doing harm. It is best done with a respect and reverence for the power of self-organizing systems, spontaneous order and the resilience of natural equilibria. Its best done slowly, and in baby steps, building upon the wisdom of the past.

Actually, the things that have brought people longer, happier, more secure lives, have resulted from large scale efforts that have been the product of government and activists working jointly, not from small scale personal efforts. Early Twentieth Century progressivsm helped produce massive public health improvements through the introduction of sanitary water supplies, sewer systems, the professionalization of medicine, and mandatory vaccination against disease, all of which led to longer and healthier lives on a mass level. The combination of New Deal policies and the advent of mass unionism brought about Social Security, living wages, safer workplaces, shorter work weeks, pensions, paid vacations, paid sick leave, and the rise of the great American middle class. The Great Society added guaranteed health care for the elderly and the promise of equality for African Americans, after a shameful century spent respecting "the wisdom of the past." I would think that as a young, African American male lucky enough to now be plying his trade as a professor of the University of North Fucking Carolina, Mr. Smith might have some appreciation for this latter point.

In short, life, though finite, has much to recommend it -- especially if one can live in a society in which a long, healthy, secure, and reasonably affluent life is available on a wide-scale basis. And that is not accomplished through baby steps, or personal or charitable efforts, or undue reverence for "spontaneous order" or "natural equilibria." The most effective way to "ease pain" -- a worthy goal indeed -- is to see that people are not mired in poverty and powerlessness, have easy access to education and health care, enjoy safe work places, are guaranteed time for leisure and a dignified retirement. Yes, bad things will continue to happen, but so will a whole lot of good things. And this is not some pipe dream or unattainable state -- it's called social democracy and it works. I'd suggest the professor of economics stop the juvenile, world weary posing and look into it.

Driftglass thinks that Daley's upcoming retirement is leaving a Rahm Emanuel-shaped hole in Chicago's city government. While I would prefer Emanuel getting run out of DC to slink into well-deserved obscurity, I'll be glad to see him leave whatever the circumstances. He's not the only thing wrong with DC, but he's a great example of everything that is wrong. If the Obama Administration's political strategy has been at all a result of his advice, then he's terrible at his job.

The question would then be about who should replace Rahm, and I have a fantastic, foolproof idea. His identity follows the jump.

Amanda has a post up about Palin's use of the phrase, "there are no coincidences." She rightly ties it to a form of predestination, the belief that God, in his omniscience and sovereignty, chooses who will belong to him and who will not. The logical outgrowth of this is the idea that God micromanages every single aspect of reality - that he will, as I mentioned in my last post, cause a bunch of people to get their oil changed all at once so you will notice how worn your tires are.

Anyway, you might be interested in this post I wrote a while ago about Palin's beliefs. If the press would apply the slightest bit of scrutiny to her belief system, no one would want to touch her.

MHB's insightful comment that "[u]nfortunately my experience is that when assholes pray for guidance they
usually report that God wants them to keep right on being assholes" brings to mind a couple of things.

First is one of my favorite stories from my seminary days, one that I'm sure I've mentioned before. Several students at the seminary I attended lived in Westport, a part of Kansas City known for its nightlife and diversity of residents. It's especially known as a place with a higher concentration of GLBT residents than the rest of KC. IOW, a go-to place for those people who think that standing on a street corner, screaming at people about their sinfulness is the best way to spread the "good news."

A classmate of mine that lived down there decided one day to approach one of the street preachers. This preacher was screaming at everyone in Westport that day, convinced that their mere presence in such a den of iniquity was proof that they were all hell-bound. My friend approached him and asked, "Why are you doing this? Why do you come down here to preach like this? The response was that "Jesus told me to, man. I'm doing what the Lord told me to do." My friend then put his hand on the preacher's shoulder, looked into his eyes and said, "Dude. Jesus never told anybody to be an asshole." And he walked away.

The other thing happened involves a sermon preached just this last Sunday. My wife was visiting friends out of town and went to church with them. The subject of the sermon was how we can recognize God's involvement in this world, and the primary example of that was a story of how the pastor's wife and kids were leaving on a trip and needed the oil changed in their van. They went down to Jiffy Lube only to find it uncharacteristically busy, so they were forced to go to a full-service garage to get the oil changed. While there they discovered that both rear tires on the van were extremely worn and needed to be replaced immediately.

See? That's God being active in this world. God manipulated a bunch of people into getting their oil changed all at the same time so that the pastor's family would go to a different place for their oil change, thereby noticing their worn tires, saving them some inconvenience down the road.

This is the God the Christians are offering: one the one hand, it's a vicious, hateful space monster that expects its followers to practice hate and violence upon everyone else. On the other hand, when they get around to saying anything positive about their God, he's petty and irrelevant, too caught up in micromanaging life's inconveniences to be able to affect any real change as to the problems of hunger or sickness.

Do people really think this, that China is "communist?" China has an authoritarian government that cares little, if at all, for civil rights. If you want to run a business that produces a substandard, often toxic product while ruthlessly abusing your employees, go right ahead. As long as you don't get caught and make the regime look bad, you're free to do whatever you want.

That the Chinese government will shoot your ass if you get caught has nothing to do with "communism" and everything to do with being authoritarian.

Difficulties experienced by foreign corporations in breaking into China's markets has nothing to do with "communism" and everything to do with those corporations' unreasonable demands about copyrights and patents, as well as a healthy lack of any desire to see profits leaving China for other countries.

China is a perfect example of the type of capitalistic/libertarian society the GOP wants to create over here - people with money live quite well while people without it live short, nasty lives spent entirely in the service of their economic superiors.

For example, you've probably heard that people in China are only allowed one child. Not true at all. People can have as many children as they want. It's just that they have to pay the government a fee if they want more than one child (farmers are exempt from this). See? It's a libertarian paradise, because people with money get to do what they want.

China is the GOP's end-game for the USA. Not China as it could be, China as it is now: polluted, over-crowded, a nation with a very few extremely wealthy individuals living off the suffering of the masses.

September 07, 2010

I refuse to link to the asshole who, from his dinky little fringe ass "Church of You're Evil and God Hates You For It" in Eastfuckyercuzzin, Florida. He's already gotten far too much press and attention.

After General Petreus voiced his concerns that the action of this Christiopathic jerk (wow, i'm proud of myself, i haven't called him a cocksucker yet) would inflame anti-American sentiments and give aid and comfort to our enemies and place the lives of Americans in greater danger, this idiot, this self-righteous piece of shit, said that he would "pray for guidance."

Unfortunately my experience is that when assholes pray for guidance they usually report that God wants them to keep right on being assholes.

My own plan for the day involves hanging out with my little town's Interfaith council where we will attend the Ramadan services at the local mosque, followed by a delightful feast as our muslim friends, neighbors, and fellow Americans break their Ramadan fast for the day. I also plan to give away a few copies of the Koran. Not because I believe that Islam is the revealed truth of anything, but, because they are my friends, neighbors, and fellow Americans who are not to be tolerated, but to enjoy the same liberty of conscience and worship that is supposed to be the right of all.

The rights of free speech allow the Florida dickfaced moron the liberty to say and do what the fuck he pleases. I will exercise my same rights by ridiculing, deriding, and saying that deluded jerkwagons like him give me a goddamned rash right on my half-breed ass.

September 06, 2010

I was going to try and crank out something original for Labor Day, but actually came across three excellent pieces while perusing the newspapers today -- what a rare event -- so I think I am going to draft off of Harold Meyerson and E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post and Cornell Professor Jefferson Cowie in the New York Times. The always excellent Meyerson -- his survival at the Post is a small miracle -- laments the continued erosion of organized labor in the American private sector, a decline that threatens to become terminal at some point, and notes that it has resulted in the American workers bearing the disproportionate brunt of the current recession. He contrasts this to Europe, where the impact of the recession has been considerably ameliorated for workers as a result of their political and organizational clout.

Even worse than the falling membership numbers is the extent to which the ethos animating organized labor is increasingly foreign to American culture. The union movement has always been attached to a set of values -- solidarity being the most important, the sense that each should look out for the interests of all. This promoted other commitments: to mutual assistance, to a rough-and-ready sense of equality, to a disdain for elitism, to a belief that democracy and individual rights did not stop at the plant gate or the office reception room.

(He also points out the crucial role of the United Auto Workers in the civil rights struggle, a refreshing and timely reminder at a time when some in Democratic circles think that it is okay to say fuck the UAW.)

Lastly, Professor Cowie talks about a time, not so long ago, when workers struck and struck often, not just for money, but for their own dignity in the work place. In the words of the old IWW slogan, the quest for not just bread, but roses too. Alas, 1970 seems like a million years ago in that regard -- can you imagine well paid industrial workers downing tools now because their work place was dehumanizing or because management showed them a lack of respect? Hell, let's just cut the question short -- can you imagine well paid industrial workers?

Ultimately, what Messrs. Meyerson, Dionne, and Cowie all get at in slightly different ways is that the demise of organized labor is the demise of both countervailing power and counter-cultural narratives that were crucial in creating the broadly prosperous, more egalitarian (on a class basis) America of the period 1945-1980.

Something that they don't point out is that a white working class America that is completely unmoored from the organizing and educational guidance of unions is one that is increasingly reactionary in its politics, laden with racist and nativists resentments, and suffering from a total absence of mediating institutions that can explain powerlessness and an eroding standard of living in an accurate and meaningful way. In such an environment, members of the working class begin to eerily resemble the character "Blake" in Jonathan Franzen's novel "Freedom" who sports a bumper sticker on his Ford F250 that reads "I'm White and I Vote." In an America without unions, tribalism will trump solidarity every time -- and we will all suffer for it.

September 05, 2010

Hope all is well with you. Still recovering from too much work, which has rendered me somewhat depleted in terms of desire to write. That and a certain despair about the current political moment. But on the plus side, it is stunningly beautiful here. The windows are open for the first time since the last week of June, there is actually a bit of a chill in the air, and the last two days have been crystaline. I managed to get back to the gym yesterday for the first time in about three weeks and to play a couple of hours of tennis and live to tell the tale.

Amusing anecdote of the week: I arrived early at the courts at the hoity toity St. Alban's school and began hitting serves by myself (I am not a member but one of my playing partners belongs) when the young tennis pro there walked by and said "sir, we have a whites only policy." I laughed and said, "well, it's always seemed that way to me, but I don't think I'd say it so openly." He looked puzzled -- it occurred to me that he was not from the U.S. -- and said, "the dress code sir, you need to wear whites." I, of course, had my black shorts, black sneakers, and gray sleeveless shirt ensemble on, suitable for all occasions. I assured him that I would look completely virginal the next time I took to the courts.

I suppose it would be appropriate to discuss the state of the labor movement on Labor Day, but frankly I'd rather focus on the beautiful weather and the prospects of playing tennis again on Monday. Suffice it to say that things suck and I really don't know what the future holds, but nothing good seems to be on the horizon.

But still, we fight on, we must fight on.

Enjoy your day off and remember those who made it possible. And drink a toast to the salt of the earth. And consider this an open thread.

September 03, 2010

I swear on everything that is holy, everything that is unholy and everything that is holey that if I ever come face-to-face with fuckstick extraordinaire Rahm Emanuel, I will tell him to go fuck himself with a fucking rusty metal pole.

"Fuck the UAW?" Really? Fuck you, Rahm. The question is not how many votes Democrats are going to lose because of this clown's bad advice and pathological need to insult his most important constituencies, it's how many goddamn SEATS he's going to cost us.

I've been a big advocate of mandating paid vacation and sick days for a long time now. The reasons are obvious: people need time off, sometimes because we get sick, and sometimes just because we need a respite from the wear and tear of working. This is especially true for the low-wage workers that are least likely to have any paid vacation time or sick days.

I'd bet that a law mandating two weeks' paid vacation, and five sick days per year, would be overwhelmingly supported by actual living, breathing human beings, though it would surely be massively opposed by the corporate world. Still, that's the sort of battle line that we'd like to draw, isn't it?

Not that I think that would be the ideal amount of paid leave, just that job one would be to get any minimal amount of paid leave enshrined in the law.

But this issue was brought to mind by a back-and-forth on this issue between Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and others over the past day or so. Matt says:

A paid vacation is a kind of accounting fiction — you continue to draw a paycheck (and health care benefits, etc.) even while you’re on vacation. But nobody’s going to pay you to go on vacation. You’re paid for the work that you actually do. The money you get on your vacation days is part of your payment for the work you do on the other days. Over the long run, if the government mandates a certain number of paid vacation days, then positions that currently offer fewer vacation days then that will become less lucrative.

And:

over the long run the total share of GDP going to labor force compensation is roughly constant at around 56 percent of GDP...If you make employers give people more time off, that will be made-up somewhere else in the system. Simply mandating a certain mix of vacation time (or any other kind of benefit) doesn’t change bargaining power available to low-productivity workers.

That last sentence is just plain wrong. Mandating benefits to the lowest-paid workers the only way to increase their bargaining power, since they have essentially none of their own. And it's pretty damned effective, too. When we increased the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour, how many workers earning less than $7 per hour had any meaningful paid benefits? Very few, I'd bet. What countervailing cost did they incur when their wages increased? None.

Matt is right that the costs of mandated vacation and sick leave will be made up somewhere else in the system. The question is, where? In the case of the minimum wage hike, it's hard to say, but it surely came from people who can better afford it, whether it came out of corporate dividends, or out of the benefit packages of higher-paid workers, or wherever. The same would surely be true of mandated vacation and sick days - and it would be more easily absorbed than the minimum wage hike.

After all, the jump from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour is a 41% increase in wages and FICA payments for those at the bottom rung of our economy. Ten days of paid vacation and five paid sick days would effectively increase the pay of those who had neither by a multiple of 52/49 - the weeks they'd be paid for, divided by those they'd actually work. 52/49 = 1.061, a 6.1% increase in compensation.

That's pretty modest, but it would make a real difference in the lives of those that have few or no paid days off. And it would probably have a bit of a ripple effect: two weeks' vacation is no longer a selling point to a potential employee when the law requires that you offer at least that much. There's also the matter of status: people who aren't as easily replaceable as the folks stocking shelves at WallyWorld will expect a better benefits package than those folks, including the amount of paid time off.

Matt's right that paid vacation is a bit of an accounting fiction, but sometimes those fictions have real-world implications. Most people aren't in a position to individually negotiate a tradeoff between vacation and base pay; they've got to take what their employer is offering everyone else with a similar job type. There's really no way to get people some more vacation (or, for those at the bottom, any vacation at all) without either mandating it by law, or having unions that can negotiate it (a rarity these days, unfortunately), or having the market mandate it (even rarer, in the absence of the first two).

Finally, I'd bet my bottom dollar that Matt's wrong about his boldfaced sentence that "Over the long run, if the government mandates a certain number of paid vacation days, then positions that currently offer fewer vacation days then that will become less lucrative." First of all, there just isn't that much room for most of them to become less lucrative. Second, unlike pay hikes, a paid leave requirement has the side effect of reducing the annual productivity of each worker by the amount of leave taken.

Now, we normally regard a drop in productivity as a bad thing, but think it through: if the demand for a company's products remains unchanged, but its workforce just became 6% less productive because they now had 15 days of leave each year, what are they going to do about it? If they're profitable, or expect to be in the near future, they're going to hire more workers so that they can meet the demand, and sell as much of their product as they possibly can.

And (Econ 101 time!) if the demand for X increases, what happens to the price of X? Right, it goes up. And that's true even if X is the workers of a certain class. It may go up only infinitesimally, if the supply of those workers is very large, but it damned sure won't go down.

So mandating a modest amount of paid vacation and sick days won't cause the wages of our lowest-paid workers to decrease over time. Quite the opposite, actually.

Stephen Hawking says that God did not create the universe. Apparently this is a bit of a change from his previous statements about religion. Fair enough, I suppose. What gets me, though, is that according to the article, this change is a result of the discovery of exoplanets:

In his latest book, he said the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting
another star other than the Sun helped deconstruct the view of the
father of physics Isaac Newton that the universe could not have arisen
out of chaos but was created by God.

"That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions -- the single
Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass, far
less remarkable, and far less compelling evidence that the Earth was
carefully designed just to please us human beings," he writes.

That seems a poor reason to abandon the possibility of a God. Prior to 1992, did he really think that our solar system was unique in the vastness of the universe? And did this uniqueness, especially as applied to the Earth, really inspire him to consider the possbility of a God? Even the most anti-science Evangelical zealot doesn't base his or her belief in God on the idea that the Earth is totally unique and alone in the universe. It just doesn't come up.

It seems to me that whether one believes in a creator-god or not, the likelihood that we are the only sentient life in the universe is exceedingly small.

When Glenn Beck talks about religion, it doesn't make me angry, it makes me feel naseated. Nothing shows the complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the conservative movement, however, than the willingness of any person of any faith to be associated with such an obvious charlatan. In everything he does, Beck is a parody of himself. Beck once spent days on his radio show going through an elaborate hoax in which he claimed he would send a live gerbil through a bank's drive-thru tube, and nothing about him, from his creepy mugging for the camera, to his Vick's-induced tears, to his remarkable commitment to lying about every single thing he discusses, has changed from his puerile morning-show days. He wants to marry the Religious Right to the Teabaggers, not because he necessarily believes in his own BS, but because he wants to expand his market presence. Beck and Palin are very similar. Both of them are doing whatever it takes to cash in while they can with no long-term strategy in place.

It's been out a while, but Andrew Walsh wrote an excellent article for Religion in the News about the continuing sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church. Walsh works hard to be even-handed in his account, but the current Pope doesn't end up looking very good. It's clear that his priority - like those of most of the RCC's bishops and priests - is a wrongheaded desire to protect the reputation of the Roman Catholic Church, no matter what innocent victims have suffered

September 02, 2010

Incendiary song seems to fit my mood.-- the Rumour were a really fabulous band. On this song usual rhythm guitarist Martin Belmont fires off great jagged leads, while usual lead guitarist Brinsley Schwarz handles the reggae style rhythm. The song opens with one of those great Parkeresque lines:

"Crimson autograph is what we leave behind, everywhere that man sets foot."

Heading to NYC today to look at a couple of schools with the young master. It's my first non-working day in seventeen days and I believe the first vacation day (of sorts) of the summer. I am totally ready. Amtrak is doing the driving and I've got the latest Jonathan Franzen novel, "Freedom" to keep me company.

Have a great day. I'm not on the Accela (on my own dime) and I'm not sure if they have access to the internets.

September 01, 2010

I'll be back soon with something witty or wicked or pissed-off-ish to say, but until then, I thought I'd better deal with our current spam problem by temporarily installing a word-verification function in the comments section. I apologize for the inconvenience, and I hope it will only be necessary for a few days--long enough to train whichever spambot that's doing this to go elsewhere.

But, he's far from being anywhere close to recovery. It happens to a lot of folks. There's this temptation, which is always a pitfall for an addict to go "Cool! Jesus washed my ass whiter than snow, I don't drink/drug/smoke/shoot/stick up my ass that shit anymore."

There are a lot of religion based programs that cater to helping people get off drugs. I haven't met many folks who have any kind of long term recovery from them. My own personal observation is that they take the first three steps, which in many ways are the most important steps, for the person trying to recover which robs that person of the spiritual journey that is essential to long term recovery. My own journey did not lead me to any god or any religion. Thing is though, I made that journey.

When you take somebody like Glenn Beck who, while they are doing what ever they do, is a lying, cheating, sniveling, whining drunken cocksucker and take away the dope to be replaced with Jesus all you will ever end up with is a lying, cheating, sniveling, whining, sober and sanctimonious cocksucker.

Kathleen Parker in today's Washington Post, gets it wrong as usual. What Glenn Beck does isn't anything close to what happens in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. I've been going for close to twenty years, and I admit that I've seen lots of folks like Glenn. I've also seen them not last very long.

One of the things that I've really come to admire about AA is that it is one of the purest forms of democracy out there. Meetings are autonomous, as are the people who attend them. Lines can be drawn and those who stray to the point of affecting AA as a whole are put in check, but, affecting AA as a whole is almost impossible to do. A very cool thing that one of the co-founders, Bill Wilson, said about AA is "AA works best when it is simultaniously a responsive democracy and a benign anarchy."

I didn't come to recovery because of law enforcement, and I had my run ins with them. I didn't come to recovery because of family intervention (they tried twice and failed miserably both times). I quit because it was time for me to stop. The last time I got sober, it was simply time, I was done.

Sometimes in a meeting I will say "I can tell my entire story in less than thirty seconds. (at this point incredulous looks appear)I did way too much dope for way too many years and my life sucked.So, I quit doing dope, but my life still sucked.So I started doing dope again and my life sucked worse.So I quit doing dope, started to go to meetings, got a sponsor, took some steps, and after twenty years,My. Life. Doesn't. Suck."

Folks like Glenn Beck take the easy way out. While my life in recovery has been rewarding and one of the very best things I've done, it ain't been easy. I'm glad that Glenn isn't getting stoned anymore. Truly. I wouldn't wish a life of active addiction on anyone. I can testify though, easy don't cut it Glenn. You need to get to work.

If I had to define one of the three of four most salient qualities of the American national character or ethos, it is that historically we have been people who built big things and did so despite enormous logistical and technical difficulties. From the transcontinental railroad to the Panama Canal to the Hoover Dam, TVA, and other myriad projects of the New Deal, to the astonishing production during World War II, including, however morally dubious, the conception of and completion of the atomic bomb in just a few short years, followed thereafter by the Interstate Highway System and the Apollo moon project -- where we literally went from the first sub-orbital flight to a man on the moon in less than a decade -- there is an amazing lists of accomplishments that reflected a culture of problem solving and doing -- one in which government took the lead and made things happen, either on its own or in conjunction with the private sector.

And yet in the last week or so, I've been reading about the inability of a local public utility unable to quickly restore electricity after summer storms, of broken waters mains, unsafe bridges, and, in Iraq, of the United States abandoning billions of dollars in uncompleted projects, unable to finish such basic infrastructure projects as sewer systems and electrical grids.

The question that arises in my mind is when did this happen to us as a people and what can we do to solve it? It's not like there isn't a plethora of infrastructure needs and projects out there. And we have an army of the unemployed who could be called upon to do these things. Why is it that the American people are now satisfied, at some level, with a second class infrastructure, that is too often jury-rigged and inefficient? And why do we suddenly seem to view failure as not only acceptable, but, indeed, to be expected?